Quotes by Subject: Politics & History
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It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting. | * | ||
My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes. | |||
What is qualified? What have I been qualified for in my life? I haven't been qualified to be a mayor. I'm not qualified to be a songwriter. I'm not qualified to be a TV producer. I'm not qualified to be a successful businessman. And so, I don't know what qualified means. And I think people get too hung up on that in a way, you know? | |||
Always forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. | |||
If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. | * | ||
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. | * | ||
Our patience will achieve more than our force. | |||
It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it. | |||
Oh, that lovely title, ex-president. | |||
War is a series of catastrophes that results in victory. | |||
A lie told often enough becomes the truth. | * | ||
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. | |||
A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him. | |||
It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours. | * | ||
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. | |||
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election. | * | ||
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner. | |||
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. | |||
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim. | |||
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. | * | ||
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. | |||
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. | |||
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. | |||
When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision. | |||
The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. | |||
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. | |||
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men. | |||
Half the failures of this world arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping. | |||
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. | |||
It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do. | * | ||
History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances. | |||
Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it. | |||
We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by. | |||
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. | |||
Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. | |||
What you cannot enforce, do not command. | * | ||
Find out where the people want to go, then hustle yourself around in front of them. | |||
I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty. | |||
Bill Clinton us 52 today. That's a tough age. I just hope he doesn't have some sort of midlife crisis and go out and do something stupid. | |||
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. | |||
People in this country are born thinking they have two inalienable rights. One is to become President of the United States; the other is to direct a major motion picture. | |||
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock. | |||
We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by. | |||
What you cannot enforce, do not command. | |||
Of course I'm an optimist. What's the point of being anything else? | |||
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. | |||
Destiny is not a matter of chance, It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, It is a thing to be achieved. | |||
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a national where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. | * | ||
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. | |||
There are five ways of knowing who will win. Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are victorious. Those who discern when to use many or few troops are victorious. Those who upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious. Those who face the unprepared with preparation are victorious. Those whose generals are able and not constrained by their governments are victorious. These five are the ways to know who will win. | |||
When smashing monuments, save the pedestals - they always come in handy. | |||
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. | |||
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. | |||
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. | * | ||
The time is always right to do what is right. | * | ||
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. | |||
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country | |||
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted into each others' pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third. | |||
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. | |||
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded... I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed... I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war. | |||
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. | |||
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. | |||
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer. | |||
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, even two blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room. | |||
It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door. | |||
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. | |||
Ask not what your country can do for you: ask what you can do for your country. | |||
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. | * | ||
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. | |||
Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country. | |||
When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers. | |||
Of course I'm an optimist. There's no point in being anything else. (during the Battle of Britain, 1942) | |||
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. | |||
Justice limps along... but it gets there all the same. | * | ||
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. | * | ||
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. (The Third Man, 1949) | |||
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. | |||
If you cannot convince them, confuse them. | * | ||
When the eagles are silent, the parrots being to jabber. | * | ||
The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it's the opposition. | |||
I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old. | |||
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. | |||
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. | |||
There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right in America. | |||
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. | * | ||
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. | |||
I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man. | |||
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. | * | ||
Do you know it costs forty thousand dollars a year to house each prisoner? Jeez, for forty thousand bucks apiece I'll take a few prisoners into my house. I live in Los Angeles. I already have bars on the windows. I don't think we should give free room and board to criminals. I think they should have to run twelve hours a day on a treadmill and generate electricity. And if they don't want to run, they can rest in the chair that's hooked up to the generator. | |||
Democracy is a form of government that subsitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. | * | ||
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. | |||
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. | |||
The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a freind. | |||
The supply of words on the world market is plentiful, but the demand is falling. | * | ||
I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell. | |||
The earth belongs to the living, not the dead. | |||
Force is all conquering, but its victories are short-lived. | * | ||
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. | |||
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. | |||
Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold. | * | ||
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. | * | ||
This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing. -- 14 Sep 2001 | |||
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. | |||
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. | * | ||
If you want to make enemies, try to change something. | * | ||
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power. | |||
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! | |||
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. | |||
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | * | ||
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. | |||
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. | |||
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. | * | ||
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. | * | ||
We make war that we may live in peace. | |||
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace. | |||
Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian. | |||
What does it say that [tv movie] "Saving Jessica Lynch" is more candid than much of the reportage about the war? (NY Times, 11/9/03) | |||
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. | * | ||
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. | |||
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. | * | ||
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. | |||
A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece. | |||
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. | |||
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history. | |||
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book. | * | ||
There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true. | * | ||
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be: a Christian. | |||
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. | * | ||
War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over. | * | ||
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon. | |||
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. | |||
Where there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. | * | ||
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. | |||
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. | * | ||
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. | |||
Politicians are like monkeys. The higher they climb up the tree, the more revolting are the parts they expose. | |||
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. | |||
It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country. | * | ||
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. | * | ||
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty'. | * | ||
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never shall be. | * | ||
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. | * | ||
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. | |||
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. | |||
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. | |||
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. | * | ||
A true friend stabs you in the front. | |||
Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distiguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. | * | ||
A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree; if you agree with him he is a statesman. | |||
We should avoid modifying the constitution in response to cyclical changes in American public opinion. | |||
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. | * | ||
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. | * | ||
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. | |||
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid. | * | ||
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. | |||
Government, even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, and intolerable one. | |||
Those who like to fight and so exhaust their military inevitably perish. | * | ||
Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy. | |||
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. | * | ||
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it. | |||
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. | |||
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. (1798 after passage of the Alien and Sedition Act) | * | ||
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. | |||
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid. | * | ||
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? | * | ||
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! | * | ||
There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject. | |||
Truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent. | |||
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. | |||
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. | |||
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. | * | ||
All politics are based on the indifference of the majority. | |||
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. | * | ||
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. | * | ||
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. | * | ||
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. | |||
The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world. | |||
Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice. | |||
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. | |||
When you control the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, it's a neat trick to act like an underdog. | |||
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government. | * | ||
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatalbe. | |||
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. | |||
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. | |||
We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? | |||
The true enemy of a revolutionary is a liberal. | |||
Go into the street and give one man a lecture on morality and another a shilling, and see which will repect you most. | |||
Once the people begin to reason, all is lost. | * | ||
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas. | * | ||
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don?t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. | |||
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes. | |||
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! | |||
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. | * | ||
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. | |||
Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody. | * | ||
Information is the currency of democracy. | |||
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins. | |||
A democracy can die of too many lies. | * | ||
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. | |||
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. | |||
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure--that is all that agnosticism means. | |||
A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors. | |||
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. | * | ||
A large part of the problem in the world today is that the people who start wars do not fight in them. If they did, we would have fewer wars. | |||
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' | |||
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile -- hoping it will eat him last. | * | ||
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing. | * | ||
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. | |||
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. | |||
The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony. | * | ||
During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe... where every man is enemy to every man. In such conditions there is no place for Industry... no Arts; no Letters; no Society... and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. | |||
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time. | |||
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. | |||
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right. | |||
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. | |||
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks. | |||
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. | |||
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination. | * | ||
These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness. | |||
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting. | |||
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. | |||
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. | |||
If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. | |||
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. | * | ||
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. | * | ||
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic. | |||
People only see what they are prepared to see. | * | ||
You love life. We love death. | |||
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. | * | ||
The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of. | |||
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too. | |||
Of course we're winning. That is why our games are so tough. The other teams sense we are going to win, so they are beating us. | * | ||
The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. | * | ||
We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million people who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government. | |||
Let's drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let's drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again. | * | ||
When the laws are written and administered by the most powerful leaders in a society, it is human nature for them to understand, justify, and protect the interests of themselves and people like them. Many injustices arise from this natural human failing. | |||
In contemporary America, power increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win it. | * | ||
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpertrated by disciples of altruism? | |||
The good cannot seize power, nor retain it; to do this men must love power. And the love of power is inconsistent with goodness; but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities: pride, cunning, cruelty. | * | ||
It is useless to meet revenge with revenge. It will heal nothing. | |||
When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn - all this is robbery and chaos. | |||
Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence. | |||
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. | |||
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. | * | ||
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. | |||
In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to the other. | * | ||
Stupid people are generally conservative. | * | ||
The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. | * | ||
Until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people's children to graves at Arlington. | * | ||
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. | |||
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. | |||
One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. | * | ||
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. | |||
It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you. | |||
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. | |||
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. | * | ||
An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide. | * | ||
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. | * | ||
The people I am most afraid of are those who are the most afraid. | * | ||
We always say that victory begets peace, but it never does. | |||
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. | * | ||
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. | * | ||
If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. | * | ||
In my heart I know you didn't come here just for me, you came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect union. | * | ||
You know back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true. | * | ||
America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations. | * | ||
We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change. | |||
It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now. | * | ||
Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? | * | ||
When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they're going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. | |||
R.I.P., "Change We Can Believe In". The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It's Too Late. | |||
The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are (1) emotion substituted for thought, (2) fear, (3) ignorance, and (4) propaganda. | * | ||
Parties do not lead revolutions. They follow them. | * | ||
The world has always been more impressed with the power of the US example, than the example of US power. | * | ||
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work. | * | ||
America, now is not the time for small plans. | * | ||
Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things. And you know what - it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. | |||
Words mean something. You can't just make stuff up. | |||
This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates. | * | ||
I will continue to do what is right. If that means I can't get the Republican nomination, fine. I've had a happy life. The worst thing I can do is sell my soul to the devil. | * | ||
I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land. | |||
America is struggling to fasten a name on its soul. | * | ||
When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. | * | ||
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization. | * | ||
North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. | |||
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it. | |||
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. | |||
I don't believe there's two sides to every story. It's black and white. There's right and wrong. | |||
You should not exaggerate and lie when you are vice president of the United States. | |||
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it. | * | ||
Here is your goodbye kiss, dog. | |||
There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is. | |||
It's not left versus right it's democracy versus greed. This realization sits there like an unexploded bomb. We stare at it, waiting only for someone to light the match. | |||
Each and every purchase we make is a political action. That's called the power of the consumer. We must learn to wield this power effectively. | |||
The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope. | |||
All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it. | * | ||
Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic destroyed. | * | ||
How's that hopey changey thing working out for you? | * | ||
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. | |||
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. | |||
Recognize that the golden age is right now. We're not waiting for it to arrive. We're creating it. | |||
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. | * | ||
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. | * | ||
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. | * | ||
We are the makers of history, not its victims. | |||
Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting. | |||
We will not be driven into an age of unreason if we dig deep into our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men. | |||
How delighted would be all the kings, czars, and fuhrers of the past and commissars of the present to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest. | * | ||
*indicates a past Quote of The Week
